Reviewing

REVIEWING NEW wings is a thankless task, but one we rise to with all the professionalism expected of any quality paragliding publication.

Here at Pie we are unencumbered by high-powered advertisers willing to simply give us money, or the occasional 'permanent' demo wing. We do, however, appreciate the finer details of the delicate balance needed when producing a glossy magazine that gives the paying pilot quality reviews and yet at the same time placing enough ads to give slack-arsed journalists sufficient income to take out a mortgage, raise a family and then swan off on flying holidays for the other 360 days of the year. It's a fine line between selling your soul for every last cent and producing a well-balanced review full of useful advice that let pilots know the wing is a dog and will likely kill them as soon as they touch the speedbar. A fine line indeed.

So let's get down to it and give you the latest ad-free, brutally-honest and up-front review of one of the fleet of newly-arrived-to-market world-beaters. We took the latest TopStack Floater3 (EN-C) and put it through its paces and what follows are our conclusions after several test flights and based on years and years and years of testing wings. Years!

The following report conforms to the same standards of reporting as traditional paragliding magazine tests.

"As with all wings delivered from TopStack Gliders the wing arrived well packaged in a sturdy box. The glider arrived with a rucksack, manual, inner bag, compression strap, riser bag and speedbar. TopStack Gliders know first impressions count, and the attention to detail just on getting the glider out of the box impressed us. The manual was well written and very comprehensive in both Amharic & English. Very useful. Laying out the wing in the office we were very impressed with the wing itself, it was really well put together, great craftsmanship and the standard of finish on this glider is among the best in the business. They've clearly made a perfect choice of materials, both for weight and longevity. We noticed the stitching was in really straight lines except around the curvy bits and the colour scheme went very well with the rucksack we felt.

The harness attachments seem well placed just at the end of the risers, we liked this. Pilots should take note that the risers are skinny risers, but that's standard for wings of this class, although TopStack Gliders informs us that pilots may, when ordering, specify fat-risers if preferred. All the accompanying accessories were well presented and we really liked the choice of colour for the speedbar. We found the riser-tidy bag quite useful for our sandwiches and the compression strap worked very well. We tested it.

The line attachment points seemed really strong, definitely a plus, and they use the Gibi-Rigi-Arch, plenty of Mylar and weed-wacker inserts for the leading edge. All of these technological advances are fantastic news for pilots unless, of course, someone is offering you a lift back to takeoff and you've got to get your arse on the back seat in 5 minutes. The reinforcements in the leading edge were very clever and allow the attachment of the A's to be a bit further back. Several cm's back actually. This was simply clever design we thought.

Once on-site, we test inflated the wing several times and it came overhead very easily with little effort required and very little brake needed to control the surge. So no inflation problems to report for the Floater3. None whatsoever.

Ridge soaring is a dream with this wing, the turns are flat and controlled both with and without weightshift. When at altitude we threw in a few wingovers to see how it handled and it coped magnificently. The turning was both smooth and incredibly dynamic giving the pilot the feeling of confidence through complete control. The brakes are neither too heavy, nor too light and brake travel is neither too long, nor too short for a wing in this class. The TopStack designers have outdone themselves with the control acheived through such average brake use here. It turned beautifully in thermals which we liked, as this prolonged our test flights by several minutes in some cases. Thermal centering is left up to the pilot and not automatic on this wing, a good choice we felt.

The speed system is light and easy to use. We used the full range of a two step speed bar to get the pulleys touching, but with the bar being so light it's not a problem to use it at any setting. Trim speed seems very good for a glider at this level and seems to comply with the published data. Big ears are easy to do with the split A's and they come out very quickly when released. Fantastic.

This wing certainly has an improved glide ratio over the previous model, the Floater2, and no mistake. The glide may possibly be better than all other wings in this class, but we'd shy away from such bold statements as the other magazines wouldn't like it much. But we could say it if we wanted to. When using the speedbar we felt we could maintain pretty good pitch control and we could steer it with the rear risers too if required. This is bound to be a plus when considering the target market for wings in this class. A winner, for sure.

Normally at this point in the review we would show you a pointless table of different aspects of the wings performance and manageability with the usual 5-star column on the right. This wing, like so many others, would definitely score a couple of five-star entries and the rest of the table would be filled with 4 and 4.5 stars with one 3-star entry for some obscure tested feature no-one cares about. Unfortunately, we are pressed for time with this review and would invite the reader to simply imagine the table or maybe cut/paste a table from any of our previous reviews and insert it here.

So to summarise, a fantastic glider with mid to high-level agility and handling for its class, making it a great choice for long comfortable cross-country flying and your first competitions. For the more experienced pilot this is a delightful glider to fly around with almost no effort, blending impecable handling with such high levels of performance is an impressive feat, what other wing offers such fantastic performance in such a comfortable ride.[WTF? - Ed] For pilots ready to embrace C-class wings this is a very satisfying wing that will carry you well into your early competition career and beyond."

As with all reviews, we advise pilots to test fly any wing they may be considering buying. While much time and many years of experience has gone into throwing this review together, we recognise that each pilot has different requirements and we cannot stress enough the need to fly it yourself. As such, the Pie test team cannot be held accountable should any pilot choose to buy a TopStack Floater 3 based solely on this review and find themselves stuck with a dog of a wing that does not seem to match our test pilots experiences. You have been warned.

This cut/paste job has been brought to you by Pie. The healthy choice. [WTF? - Ed]

Pie in the Sky
Funnier than the 2009 "A320 Hudson River" bridge collision

Remember

CLIPPING-IN, we all do it. Unfortunately, or so it would seem, not doing so makes for a rather shorter flight. Fucking short, in fact.

So please try and remember to do it.

Find a system that works for you [Yes you, Ed], then tell everyone else to sod-off when you're doing it.

If you don't, you might be back on terra-firma much earlier than you planned, and here at Pie, we'd wager the conversation you were having when you were distracted from checking your leg straps will seem much less important.

JFDI.

[not much humour, but WTF - Ed]

Pie in the Sky
Funnier than the 2009 "A320 Hudson River" bridge collision

French FUBAR

OUTSIDE THE French speaking world little is known about the guys down at Nervers, but all that is about to change. Here at Pie we're happy to break the news that, thanks to a little translation work and a wicked sense of humour, we could be looking at the new Blozone. Albeit without the same addiction to red.

"Nervurs?", we hear you say. "That small company that sell wings to the Frenchies?". That's right, "Nurvous". They've been at it for years, selling small volumes of French-made wings to French people, in French, in France, the French way. And good on 'em, we say. That was until last year, of course, when it seems they've decided on a new approach.

Last year, it seems, they took their first tentative step to widen their market and dabbled a toe in the English speaking world. It would seem the waters met with their approval, because this year they are following through with a full-on assault on the mainstream market. Oh yes. You heard it here first.

During 2009 they released their new lightweight mountain wing, the "LOL", and it now seems clear this was simply an early sign of their new direction. This winter, it seems, they will be rolling out a whole fleet of new wings.

The all-new Nervieous 2010/2011 lineup:

Their beginners model, the CWOT-AFAIK, already has EN-A cert & is available in all colour schemes.
The shiny new intermediate, the STFU-BTDTGTTS, is due to be one of this years top sellers.
Their sports EN-C wing, the FTBSITTTD, is already flying off the shelves. Red is sold out.
Their serial class wing, the WTF-DILLIGAF, is due to take the comp scene by storm this year.
The open-class, MTFBWY, has Blozone worried as it has more carbon than a Chilean coal mine.
Their tandem, the RUUP4IT, is due to become standard place at beach resorts all over the Med.
Last years mountain wing, the LOL, is already due to be replaced with their new ROTFLMAO.

So there it is folks, a short list of this winters new releases from those MOFO's down at Nervurs. Get AFK, go AWOL and take one for a test flight. It'll probably be a head-turning son of a bitch.

Pie in the Sky
Funnier than the 2009 "A320 Hudson River" bridge collision

Finding Pie

WE ALL know how to find things on the net right? Just pull up your old friend google and get searching, we all do it. For many of us it's part of our job, sitting there day after day using the google search engine to help us with technical issues or find reports that let us do the job of two people for only one salary. Long gone are the days when you phoned down to the office clerk and he or she looked up the details for you and called you back.

These days, if it's worth knowing, google and friends will have it indexed, cache and referenced for you. All you need to know are three or four key words that will get it on the first page of the search results. Let's face it, when did you last read the second page of results? You just refined your search terms right?

Well, it would rather seem that many readers are simply too daft to save a bookmark and have to google us when they fancy a slice of Pie. Unknown to many surfers, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, these search terms are available to us here at Pie. Yes, that's right, we can see what you [Yes, you - Ed] typed into google to find Pie. So we've taken a sample of your search terms and here's what we've found.

Quite frankly, it beggars belief that the second most popular search is "latin jocks", and it's the number one search used by Canadians. Whatever these girls (or guys) are looking for, we're pretty confident their not going to find it here at Pie. Likewise, "naked figures" features quite highly, and we're a little worried for those who've been using the 17th most popular search "xxs condom". The consensus here in the office is that we'd be pretty quick to clear our browser caches if we had to search for a pack of 3 using the phrase "xxs". Again, we can only presume that the guys who were looking for "blonde marketing" may have been a little disappointed to discover paragliding satire, rather than a Wonderbra ad designer. The least said the better about those who were searching for "pie in her face" as we also felt it rather suggested an unhealthy interest in something left-of-centre.

You couldn't make this stuff up. And we didn't.

We would also guess that someone has been looking for old friends, when we spotted the search "Thomas Pie", which we concluded was our old friend and part-time wedding photographer, Avian Lomass. We're also confident that top designer Hands Pampas has been looking for us as several searches for "Sky Vings" resulted in a visit to Pie, or maybe a group of travelling German pilots have been trying to find the BPHA online magazine. Of course, we hope they eventually did.

There are some more abstract searches that have led the casual visitor to us, "things could be worse", for example, is a rather strange search and we hope they eventually got in touch with a self-help charitable organisation that could be of more help. Google has a strange way of relating their results too. For example, some visitors were searching for "skypax", a FedEx type parcel service, and yet Pie appears fourth in google's search results. Go figure.

3 years ago when releasing our "Manilla 2007 Mini-Special" celebrating Bruce Goldchain's victory at the Worlds we, among other lighthearted endeavors, defined the verb "Brucin". Of course, at the time we never imagined we really were in the process of defining it, but as it can now be found as the fifth definition on wordsdomination.com clearly we were. Please do try and keep this in mind next time you're playing Scrabble and are down to a few difficult letters.

So there you have it readers, it really is a strange world-wide-web and clearly the all-seeing, all-knowing, internet God does not, in fact, know it all. Let's face it, when your start out in business calling your new enterprise "BackRub", would you really expect to become the worlds biggest provider of internet search results? Just google it, they really did!

Pie in the Sky
Funnier than the 2009 "A320 Hudson River" bridge collision